Going gray

08.10.17: Going gray

I’VE OFTEN ADVISED clients to use gray elements as part of their design. Maybe it’s a section flag. Or a standing head. Or a page label. Or a column sig. Or all of the above.

But which gray? Dark gray can turn to black. Light gray can disappear. What gray works best for them…on their press?

Here’s how I advise them to find out: test by running different shades of gray. In their paper. On their press. In a normal press run.

It’s easy enough to do that by using those different shades in filler ads scattered throughout the paper. Not all the fillers need to run in the same issue. In fact, it might be better to test them over the course of four or five runs.

The grays in the illustration run from 5 percent to 50 percent. Somewhere in there, we’re bound to find the shade that works just right.

Comments

Great idea for testing shades. I think older designers, especially, tend to get stuck on 10 percent or 20 percent because that’s what they used to use in pasteup. When I’m judging pages, most of the screens I see are way too dark. For our publication, we use 8 percent for boxes containing type; some people say “Really?” but it’s perfect for us and our dot gain. We use 30 to 40 percent for shading type itself, as in a feature/centerpiece head, and 40 to 50 percent for a gray box in which type is reversed.

Good points! Thanks for sharing that! I do very much the same thing…light for screens behind boxes (gray is the only color I use behind, say, an infobox) and darker for occasional screened display type. It’s a classy look!